Van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba, Canada. Until the age of four a dialect of Dutch was spoken in his home. Van Vogt's father, a lawyer, moved his family several times and his son found these moves difficult, remarking in later life:
- Childhood was a terrible period for me. I was like a ship without anchor being swept along through darkness in a storm. Again and again I sought shelter, only to be forced out of it by something new.
After starting his writing career by writing for "true confession" style pulp magazines like
True Story, van Vogt decided to switch to writing something he enjoyed, science fiction.
Van Vogt's first published SF story, "Black Destroyer" (
Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939), was inspired by
Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. The story depicted a fierce, carnivorous alien stalking the crew of an exploration spaceship. It was the cover story of the issue of
Astounding that is sometimes described as having ushered in the "Golden Age" of science fiction. The story served as the inspiration for a number of science fiction movies.(a) Pringle, David (1990) "The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction", Grafton Books, page 346."This [The voyage of the Space Beagle] is the classic 'bug-eyed monster' novel, the unacknowledged inspiration for the film
Alien and scores of similar"(b) Hughes, Aaron "Neglected Masters Book Review" retrieved 2010-09-09"The stories collected in The Voyage of the Space Beagle were perhaps the first to chronicle the adventures of the crew of a large, military-style starship exploring the universe, and doubtless influenced Gene Roddenberry strongly when he created
Star Trek.""One of the Space Beagle stories purportedly inspired the movie
Alien - the resemblance was great enough that van Vogt brought a lawsuit against the filmmakers, which reportedly settled for a $50,000 payment."(c) Walters, Trent "Oh, the Humanity of A.E. van Vogt's Monsters: Reorienting Critics and Readers to the van Vogt Method" retrieved 2010-09-09"... The Voyage Of The Space Beagle (1950), later inspired the original
Star Trek series and the movie
Alien."(d) Jonas, Gerald (2000) "A. E. van Vogt, 87, Forceful Science-Fiction Voice", New York Times obituary, 2000-02-04" 'Black Destroyer' has been cited as the inspiration for the movie
Alien and its many sequels and imitations"
In 1950 it was combined with "War of Nerves" (1950), "Discord in Scarlet" (1939) and "M33 in Andromeda" (1943) to form the novel ''[[The Voyage of the Space Beagle]]'' (1950).
In 1941, van Vogt decided to become a full-time writer, quitting his job at the Canadian Department of National Defence. Extremely prolific for a few years, van Vogt wrote a large number of short stories. In the 1950s, many of them were retrospectively patched together into novels, or "fixups" as he called them, a term which entered the vocabulary of science fiction criticism. When the original stories were related (e.g.
The War against the Rull) this was often successful. When not (e.g.
Quest for the Future) the disparate stories thrown together generally made for a less coherent plot.
One of van Vogt's best-known novels of this period is
Slan, which was originally serialised in
Astounding Science Fiction (September - December 1940). Using what became one of van Vogt's recurring themes, it told the story of a 9-year-old superman living in a world in which his kind are slain by
Homo sapiens.